Obama to Nominate Joseph Votel as Head of U.S. Central Command

WASHINGTON — President Obama will nominate Gen. Joseph L. Votel, the head of Special Operations Command, to replace Gen. Lloyd J. Austin as the next leader of United States Central Command, Defense Department officials said Wednesday.

The move reflects the Obama administration’s pivot to fighting America’s wars abroad with Special Operations troops — small bands of elite fighters who travel light and fast, without the heavy equipment and numbers of the more traditional American services. Even as Mr. Obama has repeatedly said that he opposes American ground troops in Iraq and Syria, for instance, he has continued to carve out exceptions for Special Operations forces.

General Votel, who will need to be confirmed by the Senate, will lead the United States’ most high-profile regional command, responsible for Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and other Middle East hot spots. Its mission is far-reaching, from overseeing the nation’s naval presence in the Persian Gulf to the halting troop drawdown in Afghanistan.

The imminent nomination of General Votel was first reported in The Wall Street Journal, but a Defense Department official said Wednesday that it remained unclear when Mr. Obama would make the formal announcement.

The replacement comes as the Pentagon inspector general’s office is looking into reports that Centcom, as Central Command is known, rewrote classified assessments for intelligence officials and policy makers that played down setbacks in Iraq. The New York Times reported in November that when Islamic State fighters overran a string of Iraqi cities last year, analysts at Centcom initially wrote reports documenting the humiliating retreat of the Iraqi Army. But before the assessments were final, former intelligence officials told The Times, the analysts’ superiors changed the reports to say that the Iraqi Army had “redeployed” instead of retreated.

General Austin, who has been the head of Centcom since 2013, was also criticized after a September appearance before the Senate Armed Services Committee, when he said that only four or five Syrians trained by the United States military to confront the Islamic State remained in the fight, a bleak acknowledgment that the Defense Department’s $500 million program had gone nowhere.

There have been several signs that General Votel has been gaining influence among the president’s top military advisers in recent weeks. When Mr. Obama appeared before reporters in the Pentagon briefing room last month to discuss his administration’s strategy for fighting the Islamic State in Syria, he was flanked by a coterie of top national security officials, including Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.; Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter; Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and General Votel, whose presence surprised some at the Pentagon.